The three museums the Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and the Hallwyl Museum (LSH) constitute a national authority, accountable to the Ministry of Culture. The museums base their work on a national cultural policy resolution enacted by the Swedish Parliament. The mission is to preserve the collections and contribute to a living and accessible cultural heritage.

The Royal Armoury is the oldest museum in Sweden. It was established by King Gustav II Adolph in 1628 after his decision to preserve the clothes he wore on his campaign in Poland. Its collections consist of weaponry, armours and royal clothing, as well as other objects that have belonged to members of the royal families, from the sixteenth century forward.

Skokloster Castle is one of the greatest baroque buildings of Northern Europe. It was built by Swedish general and noble man Carl Gustaf Wrangel during the years 1654 and 1676. The castle contains interesting collections. Most remarkable are the library and the two armouries.

Hallwyl Museum was built between 1893 and 1898 as the winter home of Wilhelmina and Walther von Hallwyl. They needed ample space for Wilhelmina’s collections of art and antiquities, room for entertaining and an office for the family business.

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The Contribution

The Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and the Hallwyl Museum aim to make their collections as accessible as possible, e.g. by only using free licenses for all images. This contribution of images is the largest donation from a Swedish museum to Wikimedia Commons and one of the largest worldwide. But more important than the number of images is the way they are put in context. There is data about the depicted objects, about owners and usage of the objects and links to articles in Wikipedia. This information can be of interest to the general public as well as to researchers and pupils.

This project has been made possible by financing from Vinnova (a Swedish government agency that administers state funding for research and development) and by extensive help from André Costa at Wikimedia Sweden.

Background

How we make our collections accessible at the Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and the Hallwyl Museum.

In early 2012, The Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and the Hallwyl Museum launched a web interface for the collection database. This first stage enabled users to search for objects and people related to these objects. The data is licensed under CC0.

In June 2012, we started the project Open Image Archive. The objective was to make the museums’ image archive freely available to the public. The project consisted of three parts:

Develop the web interface for our collection database, in order to be able to display high resolution images [1].

Deliver linked open data and images to K-samsök (SOCH) - the Swedish national aggregator for cultural heritage data [2]. This would allow users to collect and build new applications using the data.

Donate all of our high resolution images to Wikimedia Commons, in order to increase the reach of the material.

On 6 March 2013 the web interface was launched and 40,000 images were published online. In October 2013 we took the next step, contributing over 12,000 high resolution images, together with about 7,000 negative files, to Wikimedia Commons. The Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and the Hallwyl Museum will continually donate new images to Wikimedia Commons as a part of the ongoing cooperation.

Since then we have made more files available on Wikimedia Commons on multiple occasions. In June 2014 we uploaded 500 images as a complement to the original upload and in November the same year we completed our second large upload of roughly 6,500 images. In November 2015 we completed the third major upload of a further 6,500 images. In 2016 we made two major uploads of 2,700 images and 5,130 images as well as updating 1,500 images where the source images have been digitally improved since the original upload.

The images

The images have been produced over a long period of time and were created for documenting the collections, planning exhibits and for marketing purposes. It covers everything from digitised glass negatives to completely new images. The information about the images comes from an extensive export from the collection database of the museums and many have a rich context telling the story of who owned or produced an object, in which historical event it featured, if it has been used in any exhibits or publications along with information such as material and dimensions of the depicted objects.

These images are either in the Public Domain due to their age or freely licensed.

Images taken by the museums’ own photographers, from the 1990’s onwards are licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. The photographer’s name is provided.

CC0 is used when the museums own the copyright but refrain from claiming it, for example digitized glass negatives.

Public Domain is used where copyright has expired, or when images depict art that is Public Domain.

That means that anyone can copy, modify and disseminate the images, but please keep in mind that the images have a context that can be lost if you forget to link to the file page here on Wikimedia Commons or directly to the website of LSH.

To see how the images are used on Wikipedia you may use the Glamorous tool and to see how often the images have been displayed you may use the BaGLAMa tool.

Reporting errors

Technical problems resulting from the way we receive the metadata about images can be reported at the talk page.

Due to the fact that file names and descriptions have been automatically generated from old catalogue texts that may not have been recently edited, there may be information connected to our images that we would today consider racist, sexist or in other ways discriminating.

Our ambition is to release as many images as possible under free licenses. Because of the vast amount of images in the donation to Wikimedia, a few images that should be protected by copyright may have slipped through. We invite users to report such problems, factual errors or other metadata issues here: Commons:LSH/Error reports.